MixedThe Telegraph (UK)The early chapters are quite fun. Bratton has a sharp eye for the absurdities of the white-saviour ex-public-schoolboy ... The antics of a spendthrift trustafarian just don’t cut the same dash as the rumbling majesty of Shakespeare’s work ... But the book’s greatest issue is an invention of Bratton’s. In a grand reveal, it becomes clear that Hal’s father has been sexually abusing his son. The first time this abuse is described, it scalds. But as the novel progresses, Bratton runs out of road ... When Bratton allows his writing to breathe, you glimpse a fresher, more expansive novel.
Martin MacInnes
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"...the two storylines are closer to a double exposure. Individually, they compel – MacInnes is especially sharp on the practicalities and politicking of humanity’s first manned interplanetary mission; the rub of egos, the buzz of working on an \'insane\' project. But taken together, they blur. The effect is not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar – the book’s closest twin, despite being a film. Nolan, too, tried to mesh the intimate with the grandiose. In MacInnes’s novel, the overall impact is monumental, but chilly, lacking the warmth of human scale. Still, MacInnes has no lack of gumption, and for a longish book, In Ascension rarely slips from G-inducing pace. It’s that rare thing: a big, brawny novel of ideas that’s actually readable. And for that considerable achievement, MacInnes deserves praise. It’s no small thing, after all, to reach for the stars.\
Elizabeth Gonzalez James
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)Combines a sturdy and enjoyable revenge thriller with a po-faced, and therefore hammy, story of a generations-spanning family curse ... At its best, James’s writing has dark, enveloping magnificence ... However, the novel suffers from a nasty bout of magical realism ... The Bullet Swallower has a grim, loping energy – yet up close, it’s just as misshapen.
Colson Whitehead
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"Like its predecessor, Crook Manifesto is split into three parts, which span multiple years and encompass corrupt cops, a missing starlet and a smarmy politician on the make. But unlike Harlem Shuffle, these episodes have a looser, less coherent feel; they function almost as standalone short stories. In itself, this is no issue – yes, the middle chapter is a little underpowered, but each is compelling and well-realised. Taken altogether, though, something is lost. Harlem Shuffle benefitted from a clean throughline in Carney’s struggles to scrub off Skid Row and Freddie’s boisterous, mercurial energy. In Crook Manifesto, Freddie is out of the picture – for reasons I shouldn’t spoil – and it adds up to a less satisfying read ... Still, Carney remains an appealing, amoral hero: a not-quite-innocent. Whitehead’s New York, too, is masterfully characterful. It has intelligence, wiles, predatory cunning; it sneaks up on you when your back is turned ... Strange to admit, given that it involves murder, maimings and unrepentant malfeasance, but Crook Manifesto gave me something I had missed in recent reading: joy.\
Mark O'Connell
PositiveThe Telegraph (UK)\"Do any of these stories adequately account for Macarthur and his crimes? And more than 40 years after the fact, how could you tell? This unstable stratigraphy of truth and fiction is the subject of Mark O’Connell’s third book, A Thread of Violence. It is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read for a good while ... while the DNA of O’Connell’s book lies in literary true crime such as In Cold Blood, its true debt is to the metafictional detective stories of novelists such as Paul Auster. It is as much about the process of writing about – and the apparent impossibility of understanding – a murderer, as it is about Macarthur himself ... In the main, this self-reflective poise works well. O’Connell is a gripping writer and some episodes have a scalding chill ... occasionally, the approach shows its limits. O’Connell does not give many details about the victims’ lives. He argues that to do so would be prurient: his book is about Macarthur and how the killings have stained his life...It’s an admirable idea. But in the context of this book, especially to readers unfamiliar with the story, it means they become ciphers ... by the book’s end, that evil has again slipped from sight. Macarthur exits as he arrives: a shadow, a void, capable of vanishing even within his own story. O’Connell never succeeds in pinning him down. On its own terms then, A Thread of Violence is a failure. But what a fantastically interesting one.\
Adam Nicolson
PositiveThe Times (UK)In Nicolson’s hands the intertidal zone is shown to be rich and revelatory. His 22nd book, it is as lyrical, learned and rambunctiously eccentric as his previous work ... The early chapters, in particular, are a delight. These deal in turn with the common creatures of the shore — sandhoppers, prawns, winkles, crabs and anemones. His close watching of these miniature animals is full of wonder and warm wit ... Nicolson beachcombs scientific literature with zest. From the internecine warfare of anemones to the sex lives of green crabs, he writes with relish about these often-overlooked animals ... This book is not simply a work of natural history. Nicolson wades lustily into the philosophy of the shoreline too ... It’s heady stuff. And the movement between arguments could be clearer. One moment you’re peering closely to catch the dart of life beneath a rock, the next you’ve slipped and stumbled knee-deep into Heidegger. This approach, though, is most convincing when Nicolson turns to the history of ideas ... Does it amount to a coherent vision? No — and perhaps that’s the point. Life between the tides is uncertain and unfixed. It brims over boundaries, overspills categories. Instability is its only stability ... or a book so focused on non-human life, it is luminously humane.
Philip Pullman
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Pullman, a former teacher, is an astute mapper of the uncertain frontiers between adolescence and maturity – and Serpentine is a thoughtful exploration of those borderlands. It is gently paced, and readers expecting the rollicking thrills of His Dark Materials might stumble. But Pullman’s commitment to the full complexity of his creation – deepening its themes as Lyra ages – is admirable. Serpentine contains riches despite its brevity ... while it fits comfortably into the wider, wilder universe Pullman is building, the story never quite shakes a sense of irresolution. Perhaps though, as Pullman suggests in his author’s note, such untidiness is simply part of \'being alive and being human\'.
Olivia Laing
Rave3:AM MagazineThe kind of close attention [Laing] champions takes effort; it exacts a cost. But its rewards are equally sustaining. We survive through art, too ... Laing is as excellent a critic of the work that goes into work as she is of the art itself ... She writes masterfully incisive pen portraits, evoking in a few sharp strokes not only the public persona of the artist—but also the spirit, the troubled waters, beneath ... At a sentence level, this is startingly good ... the influence of Berger is keenly felt ... Laing’s writing is more sinuous and sly. She prefers to cast out her sentences in glittering loops, loops which run on and on, only to tighten unexpectedly, holding the reader fast, ensnared ... It is a shame, then, that some of the pieces fall back on a museum-catalogue didacticism to make their points ... Her thinking is, I think, at its keenest when it given room to stretch its legs ... some of the best pieces in Funny Weather are the longer, stand-alone essays. Here form cleaves closest to that enlarging, hospitable impulse that Laing herself celebrates in art. Ideas are permitted to roam, double back and wander: the reader is invited in, not handed a list of pronouncements at the door ... this shuttling between welcome and rejection, companionship and seclusion, sparks through Funny Weather. Laing has written a brave book, a fierce defence of openness, tolerance and the necessary high-wire act between fear of exposure and desire for communality that is buried in the pith of any creative life. She argues the artist must make space in the world for their vision, sometimes with sharp elbows, but once that vision is granted room, they have a duty—moral, artistic—to shuffle up for others as well.
